


Prologue: About BobsWorld

by Setcheti



Series: BobsWorld [1]
Category: Bob the Builder
Genre: Gen, Prologue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-07
Updated: 2014-04-07
Packaged: 2018-01-18 11:20:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1426594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How it all began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prologue: About BobsWorld

**Author's Note:**

> The BobsWorld universe is based on the premise that the Bob the Builder characters are real people, living in a real world.

At some point not too far in the future from where we are now, a brilliant scientist named Charlie concluded that AI technology was never going to reach a point where it could be used for what the governments of the world had been trying to develop it for: warfare.  Artificial intelligence, he argued, just didn’t grow in such a way that it would ever be able to take on those particular tasks for its creators.  

And wonder of wonders, mainly because Charlie was such a brilliant and well-respected scientist, he managed to convince all those same governments that he was right.

But Charlie had never said that AI was useless, just that it was never going to get where certain people wanted it to go.  He had different ideas about what could be done with AI, and he set about putting together the top people working in the field – and since he’d pretty much just seen them all put out of work, he had his pick of whoever he wanted.  Charlie was very picky.  True artificial intelligence, he contended, would eventually learn itself right into self-awareness, which meant that one day you’d be working with a program and the next day it could have blossomed into a personality.  And that meant that only thoughtful, conscientious people should be involved in the research and development.  But it also meant that those same thoughtful, conscientious people needed to be aware that once it happened that didn’t mean they were suddenly dealing with a human mind – because they weren’t.

Hence the failure of the government researchers, who had never been able to figure out that half their problem was coming from their either treating the AI like a computer or like a person, but never like what it actually was: a sentient being with a mechanical body and vastly different psychology than a human’s.  Charlie’s people at the Sol Foundation delved deeply into that psychology, and after six months they were able to tell him exactly what kind of machines could and couldn’t house AI successfully.  The right machines, they’d discovered, needed to be capable of independent movement, designed to perform specific functions rather than general ones, and equipped with the ability to sense the world around them and to express themselves in multiple ways.

It took them two years after that discovery to figure out how to make all those things happen, and then they ran into their next problem:  deciding who was going to work with the machines, and how and where they were going to do it.  People had to be specially trained to work with an AI machine, and not everyone was able to.  Again, thoughtful, conscientious, smart people were needed – but this time, those people didn’t necessarily need to be scientists.  They just needed to be people who needed particular machines in their day-to-day work, and they needed to be able to work with that machine day-in and day-out without being frustrated by the machine never emotionally growing past the level of a ten-year-old human child.

They also needed to be people who were willing to relocate in a big way.  Charlie’s foundation may have been independent of government or military control, but some of its projects were still top-secret.  And because not everyone could work with the machines – in fact, their tests had shown that some people couldn’t even _accept_ the machines, much less interact with them – working with the machines meant working someplace where everyone had been screened and trained.  But at the same time, in order to prove that the machines had a place in society, the machines needed to be _in_ society, which meant that a society as functionally normal as possible had to be created for both workers and machines to live in.

And so Project Sunflower was born.  After much deliberation the foundation purchased a large island, which was called Sol Island, and a tiny town named Sunflower Valley was located there and populated with Project scientists and their families.  And the machines, of course, although the machines weren’t normally brought to the island until the person they’d been assigned to work with was ready to come too.  The Project headquarters on the mainland controlled access with an iron fist through their heavily guarded dock, making sure that nothing and no one who didn’t belong on Sol Island got on the ferry that was the inhabitants’ single physical connection with the outside world.

That was important too.  Top secret projects don’t stay top secret if the flow of information in and out of them isn’t strictly controlled.  The island had a telephone system, but its range was limited to the island and the mainland headquarters, from where approved external communications could be routed if necessary.  Likewise internet transmissions were unrestricted coming into the system but outgoing traffic was limited and monitored, and regular mail going both ways passed under the watchful eye of the Project as well.  Cell phones were not allowed at all because their transmissions were not secure and they posed an unjustifiable security risk – unjustifiable in the eyes of Charlie and the Project because instant portable communication just wasn’t deemed a necessity in a ten-block wide town.

In any other community this sort of Big Brother mentality would have eventually incited a rebellion, but the personnel working on Project Sunflower had been hand-picked for their positions, many of them by Charlie himself, and they not only understood but agreed with the reasons behind the seemingly draconian rules that affected so many aspects of their everyday lives.  And the restrictions governing communication with the outside world did not apply to their family members who weren’t in the Project – or at least, they didn’t apply once those family members had been screened and cleared by the Project, that was.  Someday, they all knew, such measures would not be necessary any more, but until that time it was a price they had all agreed to pay.

And speaking of pay…it was good.  In fact it was _very_ good.  Not that the Project personnel ever saw any of that money in the usual sense, though, unless they went to the mainland.  Sunflower Valley – all of Sol Island, in fact – operated on a barter system similar to one that had been attempted in one or two small cities in the United States.  Sol’s system, however, had the advantage of not being forced to compete with an already established monetary economy, and it was monitored by a computer that worked out fair exchange rates for goods and services and then assigned or subtracted credits in the individual accounts of the residents when transactions of those goods and services were recorded.  The paperless system was efficient, simple to use, and accessible from any terminal on the island.  And it was flexible enough to allow casual bartering between the residents while still enabling those exchanges to be tracked; in fact, the computer used those entries to refine its own lists of set transactions, which meant the system could grow and change like a natural economy.  

As far as work went, just living on Sol wasn’t all the residents did.  There was a small industrial center located on the northeast side of Sunflower Valley, and that was where the scientists spent at least part of their days, working on a variety of projects – the Sol Foundation was about a lot more than just Project Sunflower.  Some of the personnel split their time between the labs and side jobs in town, everything from flower arranging to tech support, while other of the non-scientific occupations that keep a community running were handled by the husbands and/or wives of the working scientists or by specially chosen professionals who lived in the Valley but served the entire island.  Sunflower Valley had a hairdresser, a café, a grocery store, a library and a school – some of the residents had children, or were working on having children.  It also had postal service, a constable, and a doctor.  A committee of residents controlled the planning of public works, and a building inspector oversaw their implementation.  And those projects were physically accomplished by a civil engineer/contractor/handyman who ran the building yard where most of the AI machines lived, a sturdy building located right in the center of town and surrounded by a high concrete wall.

The wall, contrary to what a non-resident might have thought, was not there to prevent theft or vandalism; it was for protecting the nearby houses from accidental run-ins with the machines.  Scaled-down versions though they were, the AI machines were still made just about the same way regular heavy equipment was – mostly steel with heavy rubber treads and tires.  And since the machines were AI, and emotionally all young, accidents were a given.  The wall kept those accidents, as well as all the mess and noise of a working construction yard, confined to a safe area.  The lumber yard on the west side of Sunflower Valley was set up the same way for the same reason, in spite of the fact that it housed only one small forklift.

There were other AI  machines outside of the town limits, of course; the island’s recycling center had a skip-loader, two farmers had tractors, and the rail yard nestled in the central mountain foothills had a pair of snowmobiles.   The trains themselves were not AI equipped, nor would they ever be – that had been tried on an island in Scotland with disturbing results that nobody on Sol wanted to risk repeating.  The AI trains, not function-specific enough or independently mobile enough to stay sane, had developed their own magic-laden belief system and then begun to question if not outright defy their human creators in the name of serving a mysterious entity known only as “The Conductor.”  The religion had spread to the AI-equipped tugboats and steamers that served the island, and once project heads had realized how bad the situation could get the plug had been pulled on the project.  

Unfortunately for the people working on the Isle of Sodor at the time, however, that plug was pulled too late – the same day the initial report had been sent out, one of the station masters had instructed their engineers to try to ‘reason’ with the trains about their beliefs.  Which led to the discovery that the permanent pathways engraved in an AI ‘brain’ by each new experience happened to have the effect of making the trains and tugs viciously, fanatically intolerant.  Charlie had temporarily put one of the Sodor project’s surviving engineers on his payroll – temporarily, because the man couldn’t stand the thought of so much as being in the same building as an AI machine, much less interacting with one – and with his help the psychologists had learned what not to expose the machines to if they wanted them to stay sane.

That was the one part of the Project’s rulebook that had garnered complaints before the community on Sol Island had even been planned out.  Because although the residents were free to practice whatever religion they pleased behind closed doors, there couldn’t be, would never be, any churches or other signs of institutionalized religion on the island.  Period.  Ever.  People protested that, some of them vociferously…until Charlie forced them all to watch the bloody video footage of what had happened on the Isle of Sodor.  After that there was no more argument, no more complaints.  And the subsequent inclusion of a ‘decency clause’ in the contracts signed by island-bound employees was met with no comment at all.  In fact, for those who were considered for inclusion in the Project later, the clause came to be used as a screening tool – people who objected to the provisions of the clause without so much as asking for the reasons behind them were marked as unfit for inclusion in the Sunflower Valley community and limited to working on the mainland.

Not that working at headquarters was any sort of hardship, especially since some people just wouldn’t have been happy in the Valley’s small-town atmosphere anyway.  As Charlie often took pains to point out, the screening was as much about keeping the employees happy as it was about keeping the machines safe and secure; in fact, he said it was impossible to have one without the other.  “It’s a town that happens to be part of an experiment, not an experiment that sort of looks like a town,” he reminded his staff on a regular basis.  The last thing they needed was for that experiment to fail because they’d forgotten to be as careful with the thoughtful, conscientious, smart people they’d hired as they were with the machines those people had been so carefully chosen to work with.  

And because they didn’t forget – and because they had been so careful in the first place – Project Sunflower grew and blossomed just like its name, and Sunflower Valley was a pleasant place to live and work.  The restrictions imposed by the decency clause kept public life reminiscent of the setting for Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,  there was no real crime, and even though all the doors had locks nobody ever used them.  The scientists and other Project employees were happy, their families were happy…and the machines were happy, which was more than anyone had ever expected.  By the time it had hit the six-month mark, Project Sunflower was considered an unqualified success.

Charlie knew, however, that the true test of his experiment was just beginning.


End file.
